Nine
by NDV
Summary: She keeps her secrets to protect him.


CJ/Toby  
  
PGish  
  
WARNING: slightly graphic depictions of miscarriage.  
  
Forgive me for errors, I have no beta-reader. This is the first piece I've offered up in over a year, the first CJ/Toby piece in two.  
  
Nine  
  
She was pregnant once, with his child.   
  
She sat in silence in her desk chair, feet propped on an open drawer and hands splayed across her stomach. But it was too late, the child was gone. She'd squatted on the tiled bathroom floor, the color was Dakota Beige and they'd grouted it themselves a few months before, and the blood would leave the white grout stained a light brown for the rest of her time there.   
  
She was pregnant once, and she hovered over the tile floor and swirled her fingers in the blood that mixed with her tears, trying to find something of her child in the thick liquid. There was variance in it, and she imagined that, perhaps, she was gliding her finger over what might have been her daughter's spine, her son's no-longer-beating heart. She'd only known for a matter of days, she'd forgotten to notice one and skipped another before she understood. Her stomach was reasonably flat but beginning to span slightly outward, her knees stiffened in her bent position and blood coated the fingertips she brought to her lips, left prints where she pressed her hand against her bare stomach.   
  
She had not planned the child, the nine-week-old lost one, and she had not yet learned to love it. She had learned to be hard-edged and play like the boys, and sometimes she felt she had lost her femininity, her nurturing side, in exchange for her place in the Boys' Club of politics.   
  
She had not wanted the child, had not had time to embrace it's presence, to fall in love with it as she soon would have, had not even processed the thought of telling her lover, her dear one, that he had fathered a child, that he had achieved one of his dreams. He could not get a politician elected, but the child he always wanted had grown within her though she never felt it move.  
  
She had sat in silence in her desk chair, the next morning, hands splayed across her stomach, with her door shut, blinds closed. She flipped the light switch when she walked through the door, squinted, flipped it again. She was waiting for him, but he did not know it. She would not tell him, but she did not know it.   
  
She was pregnant once, but she dipped her fingers and swirled them in their conjoined blood, hers and her babe's, instead of holding him in her arms. She dreamt at night, sometimes, of the doctor laying her fat and pink son across her naked breasts, him nuzzling against and latching to her nipple for his first meal.   
  
She never told him of her dreams, never told him of his child, but it was not purely for selfish reasons. He had left her, before, in his high-mindedness and stubbornness, but he had returned because his nerves had had time to smooth over, and the fight had seemed tiny in comparison to the separation. She did not tell him, because she was so much more in love with him than he could be with her, because his heart was partitioned off and his mind was dark with thoughts of what he was not, what he could not do; he slouched because his load was heavy with his failures.   
  
She did not tell him, because she was afraid he would leave her. Yet irony reared it's head, because nine [more] weeks later, she sat at her desk again, hands splayed across her stomach, all of her pictures and papers in a box on what had been her desk. She leaned her head back against the chair, took a deep breath, and hoped he'd learn the art of forgiveness. She did not tell him, because she had to protect him, because she loved him, because she feared loneliness more than he feared drowning in his own thoughts. So she let her hands grasp the bottom of the box, and she tried not to remember the blood tinting her fingertips, and she had said good-byes to the brown-stained grout that morning when she signed the lease over to a bald-headed, greasy short man whose eyes went no higher than breast-level.   
  
She did not tell him, because her heart was breaking with the mourning she had not done, and the weight of it smashed against her chest like an anchor, but if she stopped long enough to close her eyes, if she quit moving long enough to let it catch her, she was afraid she'd forget to breathe. So she never stopped moving. Like a wall, he crashed into her when he followed her, married, years later, to bring her back to a job she'd loved once, to bring her back to him though he would not say it and she did not hear it.  
  
She was pregnant once, with his child, but someone had hit the fast-forward button nine years ago, and she was standing over a crib looking at Huck and at Molly, and she did not tell him because he had been granted his wish. He had a child, living and healthy, two of them, and she had the memory of her fingertips swirling through thick blood, and the dream of a child wet and crying against her chest.  
  
She had wanted his child, but it was too late because the child was gone, and she never told him because she loved him, and because she finally could reach out and take his hand again without her fingertips, tinged with blood in her mind's eye, burning. She did not tell him, but it was not for purely selfish reasons.   
  
When she bent low, looking down into the crib, partitioned off like his heart had once been (his babies tore down the walls like a wrecking ball), she smelled the clean of the warm skin, tasted the salt of their tears, watched Huck's feet kick and his eyes catch hers, watched Molly's fingers clench into a fist in her sleep. She knew she had not told him because this moment would one day come, and his heart would be heavy with the knowledge of two alive and one dead, and she could not bear to touch either of the children for want of her own.  
  
And then she realized she had stopped moving, and she felt like maybe she was suffocating, and Huck, he looked at her like he knew. Her hand was splayed across her stomach, the other clutching the edge of the crib, and she realized perhaps she wasn't so good at keeping her own secrets.  
  
She was pregnant once, but she had not told him because she thought that she could save him the pain; she thought that if she ran hard enough, it would not catch her; she thought that she loved him enough to crash and burn alone. 


End file.
